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War, and the triumph, in company with Ignatyev, ofextracting bloodlessly from China (1858, i860) hernominally subject Amur region and the sea-coast downto the Korean boundary, near which on a splendid sitehe founded Vladivostok, 'the domination of the East'(cf. p. 33). There was a long dispute with Japan overthe island of Sakhalin, but finally (1875) she acknowledgedit as Russian.Muravyov fully realized that there were two essentialsfor the new-won lands, and indeed for all Siberia—communications and colonization. The difficulties ofoverland communication with the Russian Pacific stationson the other side of the world had been so great that theocean route, from the Baltic round Cape Horn, had beenusual. The opening of the Amur to navigation improvedmatters. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869shortened the sea-route, now from the Black Sea insteadof the Baltic; and this continued to be a very importantauxiliary for Russian, and Soviet, communications withthe Far East even after the building of the railway. Butrailways were essential, as Muravyov urged, both forstrategic and for colonizing purposes. The Trans-Siberian did not come for another thirty years; untilthen his work bore little fruit.When he left the Far East there was said to be apopulation of 630,000 (perhaps half of them Russians)east and north of Lake Baikal, and of these a merehandful of some 30,000 were in the territory he hadadded to the empire. Less than eighty years laterinstead of 30,000 there were (1939) nearly two and a halfmillion, and instead of 630,000, four and a half million,the great mass of them Russians. This was the resultof the new development policy begun in the eighteennineties,transformed and greatly intensified under theSoviet regime, made possible by the Trans-Siberianrailway (see pp. 55-56).The Russian achievements in this gigantic and hithertovirgin land have been grimly dramatic, especially inindustrial development during the last fifteen years.Emptiness remains, however, one great characteristic,and until latterly Russian colonization was very small in300